There's more to it than "he's rich". There's nothing wrong with being rich. The relevant question is "How much in net taxes did he pay while being rich?" If it's, say, somewhere between 0% and 15%, then a lot of people are going to say "Well, there's your tax revenue problem." It would make it pretty hard for someone like Romney to make a case for leaving the Bush era tax cuts in place for the top of the income scale, while most middle-income people are paying a larger fraction of their income as taxes.
This is all bullshit. The lower rate is because the income is investment income. What a lot of people intentionally leave out about the tax rates on investment income is that is essentially extra tax on money that has already been taxed. It works like this: Say you work hard for 20 years earning about $60,000 a year. You pay about 19% in federal taxes, 5% in local/state, leaving you $45,600 to live. Somehow you manage to live a frugal existence and save 20,000 a year. After 20 years you've got $400,000. So you take your money and invest it, maybe in a company, or some stocks, or whatever. You make a decent 8% return the first year - a cool $32,000! Oh, but guess what? Even though you've worked for 20 years to save that money, the IRS now wants ANOTHER $4,800 chunk of your earnings. From money you ALREADY paid taxes on over that 20 years. Not only that, you pay that rate even though someone else making only $32,000 that year pays much less. That's on top of whatever taxes your investment entities had to pay, and any employees of those companies had to pay. So NOW what do you think of "fair share"?
That said Bain Capital's tax returns would be of far more interest than Romeny's personal returns.
Bain is an LLC, so the taxation is all pass-through to the partners. So there really aren't any tax filings by Bain as a company, other than the 1065, which is a pretty basic income statement. Not interesting at all.
Only someone one the C** would be arrogant enough to think they could keep this type of information a secret forever when you're that visible to the public and when you're decisions are going to have immediate and lasting consequences for the entire world.
Why? They have Obama's college transcripts and passport as examples. If he can keep those secret, surely Romney's tax returns can be kept under wraps too.
The national standard of No Child Left Behind -teach to a test - has failed; which was yet another standard created by a Bible thumping moron.
Actually, No Child Left Behind is mostly just an extension and continuation of Goals 2000, the OBE system created by UN bureaucrats, started by Bush Sr., expanded by Clinton, and finalized by W. The Obama administration has a program to allow states to request waivers from the testing provisions, but it actually imposes even greater control on the schools and administrators in exchange for the waiver. And his plan has all the national curriculum stuff from Goals 2000 and UNESCO as all the programs since the mid-1980's.
So, we need to keep religion completely out of education standard.
Actually, I think this system doesn't really have anything to do that. It promotes atheism, sure, but also a globalist agenda based on world citizenship, reliance on government, and the indoctrination of these principles are raised far above any attempt to provide a real academic education. Rather, it's designed to create a legion of dumb-down human resources ready for employment with multinational corporations and entirely devoid of any critical thinking skills or appreciation of intellectual philosophies. If anything, that would drive people into religion, as they are left devoid of any sense of self, expecting there to always be some authority to turn to. Easy prey for evangelists and snake-oil salesmen.
Well that may be true in the US, where people are not civilized. Compare to Japan after the tsunami. Unless your entire audience is in the US, you will still have civil customers.
I guess you don't remember what they used to use for mosquitoes: DDT. Check it out - it was safe for humans, but didn't turn out so well for the fish and birds.
But, you know, you should trust whatever it is they are spraying these days. I'm sure it's perfectly safe. Anyone that questions it is bound to be a conspiracy nut. Right?
This is a bunch of fearmongering BS. There were dire warnings on national news this morning, too.
So what is the extent of the "widespread outbreak" that is causing all the disease, mayhem and death that "appears likely to continue to cause widespread and severe illness and loss of life"?
Almost 700 cases have been reported across the country
WOW! Almost 700 cases across the country! Just this year! They don't actually say how many in Texas, or Dallas. Does that mean 700 deaths? No. 700 serious illnesses? No. 700 people, though, right? No.
There have been cases of infection reported in people, birds or mosquitoes
Ah. This is cause for a panic and a state of emergency? What for?
The move clears the way for aerial spraying to kill infected mosquitoes that transmit the disease.
Ah - there we go. Hmmm. "Don't worry about the stuff being sprayed out of those planes, citizen. It's for your protection!"
Do you really have an expectation of privacy over the license plate hanging on your car bumper?
Aren't license plates like the opposite of private?
License plate, sure. Records associated with your license plate, not so much. Everywhere you've been that a scanner, a camera, your toll road pass, all connected together with your address, your IRS records, your medical information, the geolocation information from your cell phone, your ISP's address assignment information along with your search history and your emails...
Total Information Awareness in progress. Pre-Crime Division authorization soon to follow.
I know, that really is a problem. Partisan apologist like yourself can't tell the difference between your own propaganda and the truth. The budget is not an issue, it's just Republican posturing. Or it is an issue but it's the Republican's fault. Obama's drone strikes that kill innocent children isn't a problem because the war was "inherited". Or it's because he's keeping us safe. Or if it is a problem it's not his fault because the administrators and the Pentagon are entrenched and he can't do anything about it. And it's not his fault that Leon Panetta, the warmonger, is his Secretary of Defense because he needed the political capital to get re-elected, and thus keep the knuckle-draggers out.
All false equivalency, right, because there is, of course a "good" party and an "evil" party. You can tell because of all the rainbows and unicorns dancing around DC whenever the Democrats are in charge of the government.
Sorry you don't understand big words like "consequence of appropriations" - it means a budget.
What they have done instead is to pass "continuing resolutions" instead, which means they just keep spending the same amount they did last quarter, or last year. They have done that ever since the (bipartisan) bank bailouts and the (mostly bipartisan) stimulus spending bill. It allows them to keep spending at astronomically high rates without doing the hard work of cutting spending or securing more revenues.
It's not about D/R, it's about the elite party insiders running DC, their buddies on Wall Street, and screw the rest of us.
Look, let's not mince words here. We all know that it's the fault of $PARTY_I_DON'T_LIKE. The $PARTY_I_LIKE are trying their best but their opposition refuses to compromise.
But Congress IS the party I don't like. It's made up entirely of DandR insiders.
Second, NASA funding would be placed on a multi-year rather than annual cycle.
It seems they have already been on that kind of funding for about 4 years now, seeing as Congress has failed in their Constitutional duty to pass a budget for 4 years...
it goes against several basic facts about human nature.
You're going to have to justify this claim - what aspects of "human nature" does it go against? As I explained, it's fully compatible with human nature: You control a politician's environment and you control his behavior, which is based soundly on the punishment/reward system.
These things happen, and the sum of all this, the sum of the fact that we are human and not perfect, means that no perfect system can ever exist.
I never claimed that it would be "perfect". Expecting perfection of anything run by flawed humans is unrealistic. This is really something of a straw man. And claiming that "the best we can hope for is pretty much what we've got" is not true, unless I buy into your flawed premise and allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.
Sorry, it's not in the human nature for every individual to be engaged in politics, nor for every person to be educated.
It doesn't require "every individual", nor even most. Currently in the US, less than half the eligible voters actually show up to vote in presidential elections. Off-year and local elections are even worse, somewhere between 25% and 33%. But you need some people involved, local level requires less than national, but notionally about 6% - 10% of the actual voters being fully engaged is all it would take. That should be doable.
Interesting analysis. The way I see it, the US system was initially built to function that way, and it certainly can function that way (whether it ever actually has, I leave as an exercise for historians.
What it would take is a fully engaged and educated electorate. Activists approach the system with the assumption that politicians do not have souls, and react strictly based on negative and positive reinforcement. And for a politician, the stimulus is very predictable, and is based on publicity and money. With enough people educated and engaged, they politician's environment can be closely controlled, ensuring that their behavior is correct. And note that with democratically elected representatives, an engaged electorate will always be more effective than moneyed interests. Politicians do respond to lobbyists with money, of course, but in when constituents are paying attention, that money gets trumped every time.
Yes, exactly. It's just code, it's not your life. But if your code is going to be used in a way that can save or cost lives, you're damn sure going to take a very cautious approach to make sure it works exactly right.
But of course this entire, overly-long rant begins with a stunningly flawed premise:
"We regard political conservatism as an ideological belief system that is significantly (but not completely) related to motivational concerns having to do with the psychological management of uncertainty and fear."
I hope you'll agree that this definition is minimally controversial.
Uhhh... FACEPALM! No, it's not just controversial, it's total crap. It's some justification dreamed up by some circle-jerking academics that took some political views (generally ones they didn't like), lumped them into a pot they called "conservative", then went around congratulating themselves for thinking they finally understood something that their ideological blinders made them incapable of dealing with.
I blame the poor state of accurate historical study in public schools and universities these days, but that's just a stab in the dark.
But if you study political history, it's pretty clear where the foundation of what is currently called the Conservative / Liberal viewpoints came from, and you can trace it back several hundred years to John Locke and Thomas Hobbs: Which is more important: The social collective or the individual? And when collective ideas run afoul of individual rights, how should the conflict be resolved?
Yea, start with that premise if you even want to discuss the idea that programmers are driven by the same dichotomy. Maybe then you wouldn't look like such a douchebag, Mr. Yegge.
Conservatism, at its heart, is really about risk management.
Yeah, they sure managed the hell out of the risks of invading Iraq and completely unregulated credit default swaps. Conservativism is not about risk management, but fear management. Keep people afraid of something else and they'll let you rob them blind.
I don't think either of those ideas had anything really to do with "Conservatism", at least not the Goldwater / Reagan / Jeffersonian tradition of it. "Unregulated" financial transactions are, sure, but not in a system with a Federal Reserve holding a monopoly on the financial instruments, and the Federal government willing to bail out the failures instead of letting the market tear them into pieces and distribute the pickings on its own. Unfortunately for those of us on the "outside" of the ruling elites, both of those decisions (Iraq and the bailouts) were heavily supported by both political parties. Even Hillary Clinton voted to support the Iraq invasion.
I think it speaks volumes to the amount of detail left out in stories either due to shrinking newsrooms, or rush to report rather than trying to sell a story by omission. Its a simple case why people should get their news from multiple sources.
That's a pretty generous interpretation. Add along the question as to why a mis-delivered product amounts to a "news story" at all, and it's difficult to conclude anything other than a set of purposeful decisions by reporters and editors to further an agenda. "The US has too many dangerous weapons that are too easy to get" is the narrative that fits, here. Omitting facts to improve the impact of the narrative is part of the game plan.
So wrong it's laughable. I've got some advice for you - don't get your information from US Congressmen. They very often do not know what they are talking about.
Please tell me how it is big government intrusion to enforce water rights, when someone diverts a river.
"Water rights" generally does not extend to all water of any kind regardless of source, unless you live in a country with a totalitarian government (or a state with one, like Colorado). Collecting rain water is not diverting a river, any more than placing fill dirt in a temporary puddle is polluting navigable water. You should make some effort to educate yourself on the topic, before Agenda 21 is fully implemented and the only property right you have left is the right to pay taxes.
I would like to inform you that sometimes government intrusion is needed for freedom.
Thanks for reminding us. Also, war is peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength!
Without government intrusion you could not own land, as I could just take it.
That's not intrusion, i.e. " An inappropriate or unwelcome addition, or Illegal entry upon or appropriation of the property of another. Actually, now that I think about it, the only entity I've heard of "taking" someone's land in the US for the past 200 years has been government.
I might as well, since you went to so much effort to put this together. For the record, what I was keying on were the six points in the "Science / Pseudoscience" chart, and it was unnecessarily disingenuous of you to claim that (1) I didn't click on the link (I did), and especially that (2) I was trolling (don't be a dick).
Pseudoscience relies heavily on subjective validation.
DOES NOT APPLY to climate change. The verification comes entirely in the form of statistical analysis of temperatures versus previous predictions. Relatively accurate, but requiring improvements in predictive techniques.
DOES NOT APPLY to "skepticism" BUT IN A VERY BAD WAY because no counter claims or predictions to test. The null hypothesis of "no change" is clearly invalidated, but no valid alternate predictions are given instead. This is a serious sign of pseudoscience.
One argument heavily propagated for AGW is "consensus" of scientists or "peer-reviewed papers". A fallacious argument on its face, and while numbers are not subjective, statistics and the criteria to generate them, in this case, often are. Also, your argument about "no predictions to test" applies equally to climate change, as the "predictions" are either based on a probability range too wide to really evaluate, or they are not met before "adjustments" are released to better match observations.
The other subjective criteria often used in the popular press involves selective evidence. For instance, the discredited paper that indicated the polar bear population was endangered, which later proved to be inaccurate, so instead the narrative has changed to "reduction of the arctic ice hunting grounds of the polar bear could eventually lead to a reduced population.
Pseudoscience always avoids putting its claims to a meaningful test.
DOES NOT APPLY to climate change, predictions from 10,20, and 30 years ago are all being tested and examined today.
APPLIES TO "skepticism". "Skeptics" tend to hide behind vague claims such as "it's a natural cycle" without providing assertions about what that means in terms of climate.
I don't accept your premise about skeptics, and while you are correct that climate change predictions are tested and examined today, they don't really show a compelling amount of accuracy. Aside from that, skepticism of climate science is mostly about challenging a theory, not advancing one that is more accurate, but simply pointing out that there are too many unknowns to make accurate predictions.
Pseudoscience appeals to the truth-criteria of scientific methodology while simultaneously denying their validity.
DOES NOT APPLY to climate change: existing rules of invalidation are well accepted.
MAY APPLY to some skeptics: for example the "winter was cold this year" people who ignore that it was extraordinarily hot the previous year are willfully ignoring invalidation on their own basis.
Um, if you listen to the latest news reports, they have a lot of self-proclaimed scientists claiming today that the heat waves and droughts the US is experiencing right now are clear evidence of climate change (and AGW at that). So I think both are guilty on that count.
You make some good points here, but, frankly, I don't think you can compare AGW vs. Skepticism of AGW as being separate disciplines that can be categorized separately as science or pseudoscience. Certainly Climatologyis a science. And there is clear evidence of a global warming trend in the 20th century. I think the debate is about how much human activity is contributing to the changes, how much change is happening, and whether a major change in human activity can make a difference.
Theoretical physics is also a science, but there are different theories regarding why things happen. That doesn't make string theory pseudoscience and quantum mechanics more of a real science, it's just that the string theorists are trying to explain things outside the clear observations presented in the standard model.
Slashdot Mirror
There's more to it than "he's rich". There's nothing wrong with being rich. The relevant question is "How much in net taxes did he pay while being rich?" If it's, say, somewhere between 0% and 15%, then a lot of people are going to say "Well, there's your tax revenue problem." It would make it pretty hard for someone like Romney to make a case for leaving the Bush era tax cuts in place for the top of the income scale, while most middle-income people are paying a larger fraction of their income as taxes.
This is all bullshit. The lower rate is because the income is investment income. What a lot of people intentionally leave out about the tax rates on investment income is that is essentially extra tax on money that has already been taxed. It works like this: Say you work hard for 20 years earning about $60,000 a year. You pay about 19% in federal taxes, 5% in local/state, leaving you $45,600 to live. Somehow you manage to live a frugal existence and save 20,000 a year. After 20 years you've got $400,000. So you take your money and invest it, maybe in a company, or some stocks, or whatever. You make a decent 8% return the first year - a cool $32,000! Oh, but guess what? Even though you've worked for 20 years to save that money, the IRS now wants ANOTHER $4,800 chunk of your earnings. From money you ALREADY paid taxes on over that 20 years. Not only that, you pay that rate even though someone else making only $32,000 that year pays much less. That's on top of whatever taxes your investment entities had to pay, and any employees of those companies had to pay. So NOW what do you think of "fair share"?
That said Bain Capital's tax returns would be of far more interest than Romeny's personal returns.
Bain is an LLC, so the taxation is all pass-through to the partners. So there really aren't any tax filings by Bain as a company, other than the 1065, which is a pretty basic income statement. Not interesting at all.
Only someone one the C** would be arrogant enough to think they could keep this type of information a secret forever when you're that visible to the public and when you're decisions are going to have immediate and lasting consequences for the entire world.
Why? They have Obama's college transcripts and passport as examples. If he can keep those secret, surely Romney's tax returns can be kept under wraps too.
I think your tinfoil hat is on a bit too tight.
That narrative is really tired. I don't think you're getting any play with it anymore. Please try to make more of an effort in the future.
The national standard of No Child Left Behind -teach to a test - has failed; which was yet another standard created by a Bible thumping moron.
Actually, No Child Left Behind is mostly just an extension and continuation of Goals 2000, the OBE system created by UN bureaucrats, started by Bush Sr., expanded by Clinton, and finalized by W. The Obama administration has a program to allow states to request waivers from the testing provisions, but it actually imposes even greater control on the schools and administrators in exchange for the waiver. And his plan has all the national curriculum stuff from Goals 2000 and UNESCO as all the programs since the mid-1980's.
So, we need to keep religion completely out of education standard.
Actually, I think this system doesn't really have anything to do that. It promotes atheism, sure, but also a globalist agenda based on world citizenship, reliance on government, and the indoctrination of these principles are raised far above any attempt to provide a real academic education. Rather, it's designed to create a legion of dumb-down human resources ready for employment with multinational corporations and entirely devoid of any critical thinking skills or appreciation of intellectual philosophies. If anything, that would drive people into religion, as they are left devoid of any sense of self, expecting there to always be some authority to turn to. Easy prey for evangelists and snake-oil salesmen.
Well that may be true in the US, where people are not civilized. Compare to Japan after the tsunami. Unless your entire audience is in the US, you will still have civil customers.
I guess you don't remember what they used to use for mosquitoes: DDT. Check it out - it was safe for humans, but didn't turn out so well for the fish and birds.
But, you know, you should trust whatever it is they are spraying these days. I'm sure it's perfectly safe. Anyone that questions it is bound to be a conspiracy nut. Right?
This is a bunch of fearmongering BS. There were dire warnings on national news this morning, too.
So what is the extent of the "widespread outbreak" that is causing all the disease, mayhem and death that "appears likely to continue to cause widespread and severe illness and loss of life"?
Almost 700 cases have been reported across the country
WOW! Almost 700 cases across the country! Just this year! They don't actually say how many in Texas, or Dallas. Does that mean 700 deaths? No. 700 serious illnesses? No. 700 people, though, right? No.
There have been cases of infection reported in people, birds or mosquitoes
Ah. This is cause for a panic and a state of emergency? What for?
The move clears the way for aerial spraying to kill infected mosquitoes that transmit the disease.
Ah - there we go. Hmmm. "Don't worry about the stuff being sprayed out of those planes, citizen. It's for your protection!"
Do you really have an expectation of privacy over the license plate hanging on your car bumper?
Aren't license plates like the opposite of private?
License plate, sure. Records associated with your license plate, not so much. Everywhere you've been that a scanner, a camera, your toll road pass, all connected together with your address, your IRS records, your medical information, the geolocation information from your cell phone, your ISP's address assignment information along with your search history and your emails ...
Total Information Awareness in progress. Pre-Crime Division authorization soon to follow.
That's the false equivalency problem.
I know, that really is a problem. Partisan apologist like yourself can't tell the difference between your own propaganda and the truth. The budget is not an issue, it's just Republican posturing. Or it is an issue but it's the Republican's fault. Obama's drone strikes that kill innocent children isn't a problem because the war was "inherited". Or it's because he's keeping us safe. Or if it is a problem it's not his fault because the administrators and the Pentagon are entrenched and he can't do anything about it. And it's not his fault that Leon Panetta, the warmonger, is his Secretary of Defense because he needed the political capital to get re-elected, and thus keep the knuckle-draggers out.
All false equivalency, right, because there is, of course a "good" party and an "evil" party. You can tell because of all the rainbows and unicorns dancing around DC whenever the Democrats are in charge of the government.
Sorry you don't understand big words like "consequence of appropriations" - it means a budget.
What they have done instead is to pass "continuing resolutions" instead, which means they just keep spending the same amount they did last quarter, or last year. They have done that ever since the (bipartisan) bank bailouts and the (mostly bipartisan) stimulus spending bill. It allows them to keep spending at astronomically high rates without doing the hard work of cutting spending or securing more revenues.
It's not about D/R, it's about the elite party insiders running DC, their buddies on Wall Street, and screw the rest of us.
Look, let's not mince words here. We all know that it's the fault of $PARTY_I_DON'T_LIKE. The $PARTY_I_LIKE are trying their best but their opposition refuses to compromise.
But Congress IS the party I don't like. It's made up entirely of DandR insiders.
Second, NASA funding would be placed on a multi-year rather than annual cycle.
It seems they have already been on that kind of funding for about 4 years now, seeing as Congress has failed in their Constitutional duty to pass a budget for 4 years...
You have several things wrong, here.
it goes against several basic facts about human nature.
You're going to have to justify this claim - what aspects of "human nature" does it go against? As I explained, it's fully compatible with human nature: You control a politician's environment and you control his behavior, which is based soundly on the punishment/reward system.
These things happen, and the sum of all this, the sum of the fact that we are human and not perfect, means that no perfect system can ever exist.
I never claimed that it would be "perfect". Expecting perfection of anything run by flawed humans is unrealistic. This is really something of a straw man. And claiming that "the best we can hope for is pretty much what we've got" is not true, unless I buy into your flawed premise and allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.
Sorry, it's not in the human nature for every individual to be engaged in politics, nor for every person to be educated.
It doesn't require "every individual", nor even most. Currently in the US, less than half the eligible voters actually show up to vote in presidential elections. Off-year and local elections are even worse, somewhere between 25% and 33%. But you need some people involved, local level requires less than national, but notionally about 6% - 10% of the actual voters being fully engaged is all it would take. That should be doable.
Of course I don't believe such a system exists.
Interesting analysis. The way I see it, the US system was initially built to function that way, and it certainly can function that way (whether it ever actually has, I leave as an exercise for historians.
What it would take is a fully engaged and educated electorate. Activists approach the system with the assumption that politicians do not have souls, and react strictly based on negative and positive reinforcement. And for a politician, the stimulus is very predictable, and is based on publicity and money. With enough people educated and engaged, they politician's environment can be closely controlled, ensuring that their behavior is correct. And note that with democratically elected representatives, an engaged electorate will always be more effective than moneyed interests. Politicians do respond to lobbyists with money, of course, but in when constituents are paying attention, that money gets trumped every time.
Then where are the "real" conservatives?
Well they are not in Congress. Other than maybe this one.
Yes, exactly. It's just code, it's not your life. But if your code is going to be used in a way that can save or cost lives, you're damn sure going to take a very cautious approach to make sure it works exactly right.
But of course this entire, overly-long rant begins with a stunningly flawed premise:
Uhhh ... FACEPALM! No, it's not just controversial, it's total crap. It's some justification dreamed up by some circle-jerking academics that took some political views (generally ones they didn't like), lumped them into a pot they called "conservative", then went around congratulating themselves for thinking they finally understood something that their ideological blinders made them incapable of dealing with.
I blame the poor state of accurate historical study in public schools and universities these days, but that's just a stab in the dark.
But if you study political history, it's pretty clear where the foundation of what is currently called the Conservative / Liberal viewpoints came from, and you can trace it back several hundred years to John Locke and Thomas Hobbs: Which is more important: The social collective or the individual? And when collective ideas run afoul of individual rights, how should the conflict be resolved?
Yea, start with that premise if you even want to discuss the idea that programmers are driven by the same dichotomy. Maybe then you wouldn't look like such a douchebag, Mr. Yegge.
Conservatism, at its heart, is really about risk management.
Yeah, they sure managed the hell out of the risks of invading Iraq and completely unregulated credit default swaps. Conservativism is not about risk management, but fear management. Keep people afraid of something else and they'll let you rob them blind.
I don't think either of those ideas had anything really to do with "Conservatism", at least not the Goldwater / Reagan / Jeffersonian tradition of it. "Unregulated" financial transactions are, sure, but not in a system with a Federal Reserve holding a monopoly on the financial instruments, and the Federal government willing to bail out the failures instead of letting the market tear them into pieces and distribute the pickings on its own. Unfortunately for those of us on the "outside" of the ruling elites, both of those decisions (Iraq and the bailouts) were heavily supported by both political parties. Even Hillary Clinton voted to support the Iraq invasion.
I think it speaks volumes to the amount of detail left out in stories either due to shrinking newsrooms, or rush to report rather than trying to sell a story by omission. Its a simple case why people should get their news from multiple sources.
That's a pretty generous interpretation. Add along the question as to why a mis-delivered product amounts to a "news story" at all, and it's difficult to conclude anything other than a set of purposeful decisions by reporters and editors to further an agenda. "The US has too many dangerous weapons that are too easy to get" is the narrative that fits, here. Omitting facts to improve the impact of the narrative is part of the game plan.
So wrong it's laughable. I've got some advice for you - don't get your information from US Congressmen. They very often do not know what they are talking about.
Please tell me how it is big government intrusion to enforce water rights, when someone diverts a river.
"Water rights" generally does not extend to all water of any kind regardless of source, unless you live in a country with a totalitarian government (or a state with one, like Colorado). Collecting rain water is not diverting a river, any more than placing fill dirt in a temporary puddle is polluting navigable water. You should make some effort to educate yourself on the topic, before Agenda 21 is fully implemented and the only property right you have left is the right to pay taxes.
I would like to inform you that sometimes government intrusion is needed for freedom.
Thanks for reminding us. Also, war is peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength!
Without government intrusion you could not own land, as I could just take it.
That's not intrusion, i.e. " An inappropriate or unwelcome addition, or Illegal entry upon or appropriation of the property of another. Actually, now that I think about it, the only entity I've heard of "taking" someone's land in the US for the past 200 years has been government.
Gnome developers ...
No thanks.
Well. TapeCutter has posted a reasoned, well-written response, entirely free of hyperbole and insults! Where are mod points when you need them?
Feel free to contend points you disagree with.
I might as well, since you went to so much effort to put this together. For the record, what I was keying on were the six points in the "Science / Pseudoscience" chart, and it was unnecessarily disingenuous of you to claim that (1) I didn't click on the link (I did), and especially that (2) I was trolling (don't be a dick).
Pseudoscience relies heavily on subjective validation.
DOES NOT APPLY to climate change. The verification comes entirely in the form of statistical analysis of temperatures versus previous predictions. Relatively accurate, but requiring improvements in predictive techniques. DOES NOT APPLY to "skepticism" BUT IN A VERY BAD WAY because no counter claims or predictions to test. The null hypothesis of "no change" is clearly invalidated, but no valid alternate predictions are given instead. This is a serious sign of pseudoscience.
One argument heavily propagated for AGW is "consensus" of scientists or "peer-reviewed papers". A fallacious argument on its face, and while numbers are not subjective, statistics and the criteria to generate them, in this case, often are. Also, your argument about "no predictions to test" applies equally to climate change, as the "predictions" are either based on a probability range too wide to really evaluate, or they are not met before "adjustments" are released to better match observations.
The other subjective criteria often used in the popular press involves selective evidence. For instance, the discredited paper that indicated the polar bear population was endangered, which later proved to be inaccurate, so instead the narrative has changed to "reduction of the arctic ice hunting grounds of the polar bear could eventually lead to a reduced population.
Pseudoscience always avoids putting its claims to a meaningful test. DOES NOT APPLY to climate change, predictions from 10,20, and 30 years ago are all being tested and examined today. APPLIES TO "skepticism". "Skeptics" tend to hide behind vague claims such as "it's a natural cycle" without providing assertions about what that means in terms of climate.
I don't accept your premise about skeptics, and while you are correct that climate change predictions are tested and examined today, they don't really show a compelling amount of accuracy. Aside from that, skepticism of climate science is mostly about challenging a theory, not advancing one that is more accurate, but simply pointing out that there are too many unknowns to make accurate predictions.
Pseudoscience appeals to the truth-criteria of scientific methodology while simultaneously denying their validity. DOES NOT APPLY to climate change: existing rules of invalidation are well accepted. MAY APPLY to some skeptics: for example the "winter was cold this year" people who ignore that it was extraordinarily hot the previous year are willfully ignoring invalidation on their own basis.
Um, if you listen to the latest news reports, they have a lot of self-proclaimed scientists claiming today that the heat waves and droughts the US is experiencing right now are clear evidence of climate change (and AGW at that). So I think both are guilty on that count.
You make some good points here, but, frankly, I don't think you can compare AGW vs. Skepticism of AGW as being separate disciplines that can be categorized separately as science or pseudoscience. Certainly Climatology is a science. And there is clear evidence of a global warming trend in the 20th century. I think the debate is about how much human activity is contributing to the changes, how much change is happening, and whether a major change in human activity can make a difference.
Theoretical physics is also a science, but there are different theories regarding why things happen. That doesn't make string theory pseudoscience and quantum mechanics more of a real science, it's just that the string theorists are trying to explain things outside the clear observations presented in the standard model.